I am a historian of modern Europe. My research focuses on the cultural and social history of Germany, with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. A lot of my work has centered on National Socialism, especially the ways it built on existing aspects of German culture, the ways its practices and rituals were gradually absorbed into daily life, and what happened to it after 1945.

I have tended to approach my work as a project of historical ethnography, aimed at recovering histories of daily life. I am interested in the changing ways people live, work, think, feel, and act, and what the ephemera of daily existence reveal to us about the past in a broad sense. My work is often concerned with the moral worlds human beings make and inhabit, mostly without our being fully aware of doing so. Such worlds take an endless variety of historical forms, even within the course of what is superficially a single national history, like that of Germany.

The often unconscious qualities of cultural change interest me most, but they are challenging to get at. It helps to look in unexpected places. It helps to look at the random, accidental, strange, and apparently inconsequential.

I have written about death and funerary rituals, and magical and "folk" healing in 20th-century Germany, alongside a variety of other topics that touch on popular religious life and practice. I have written also about the historical nature of ghosts, encounters some people had with vampires after WWII, and other phenomena that belong to the realm of what could be called everyday otherworldliness. My thinking about the past has been influenced by anthropology as well as by folklore and the study of historical memory. I am especially fascinated by the role of rumors and oral lore in history. My work frequently intersects with the history of war (and more particularly with the ways culture shapes war and is in turn reshaped by it). Of late I have been most interested in histories of sickness and health, and I am reading my way deeper into the fields of moral anthropology, medical anthropology, religion and medicine, social suffering, and social psychology.

I like stories and have a great respect for what they do—their power to make things, make things happen, and explain what has happened. I think of that as a defining feature of my approach to the craft of history writing.

Revisiting the "Nazi Occult" is a volume Eric Kurlander (History Department, Stetson University) and I co-edited. It appeared with Camden House in 2015. There is a long-standing idea—in popular culture and beyond—that certain esoteric or occult philosophies, "secret cults,” or millenarian networks influenced the history of Nazism. The volume's contributors explore some of the sources of this "Nazi occult" idea, ask what realities, if any, lie behind it, and inquire into the forms it might have taken after 1945. The volume also goes one step further in examining the present-day obsession of some people—among them, video game designers and popular musicians—with the "Nazi occult."

Eric and I hope the volume will prompt a reconsideration of the idea that there is some connection between Nazism and the occult by expanding on and also transcending the traditional range of themes and fields of inquiry associated with this topic. The volume's perspectives have been shaped by many influences, but all reflect a greater sensitivity to historical context than the subject has tended to receive.

...is the book I am writing. It examines a number of striking phenomena from the first post-WWII decades in what was then West Germany. These include the career of a messianic faith healer, magical healing practices, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, popular apocalypticism, exorcisms, and accusations of witchcraft, among others. These unexpected and largely unremembered matters have become for me an opportunity to examine some of the complex and often subterranean processes through which German culture and society changed after the war and after Nazism.

While the book focuses on Germany’s past, it also engages broader issues of humanistic inquiry demanding attention in our global present: the intertwining in society of knowledge, authority, trust, and morality; the enduring associations among sickness and health, sin and suffering; the enduring legacies of genocide and fascism; theodicy, and how we think about evil in the modern world; the psychology of atonement; and the fragility, rather than the triumph, of democracy. The study also aims to contribute to a broader trans-historical and trans-cultural conversation about what has it meant to be ill, suffer, and heal and to know “what is right” and “what is true” in various historically-contingent contexts and in the wake of massive social dislocation. It endeavors to contextualize fully the meanings of health, illness, and suffering in a society that, under Nazism, placed enormous cultural value on the stoic acceptance of bodily and emotional pain.

I teach readings courses on modern European and German history; I have on occasion taught our department's "introduction to graduate study in history" course, which for me involves an attempt to historicize the discipline and some of its major philosophical questions over roughly two centuries. I have also taught a course on writing the history of everyday life for graduate students.

In spring 2017, I taught a new course, "Spiritual Medicine in European History, ca. 1600-present." My students and I read histories that related health and illness to ideas about the sacred and the supernatural, good and evil, morality and suffering, sin and guilt. By reading works that span several centuries, we were able to begin historicizing some of the meanings of health and sickness over time and their evolving relationship to religion and ideas of mind, soul, and spirit. We also talked about the historical phenomenology of illness and health — that is, the changing way people experienced these states. The course was heavily interdisciplinary, examining approaches from literature, psychology, folklore, religious studies, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology.

Undergraduate courses

At UT-Knoxville, I teach large surveys; upper-division courses in modern German history; my capstone seminar, "The Supernatural: A Global History"; and an upper-level course on medicine in the Third Reich.

biography

Education

I was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A., 1998) and the University of Virginia (M.A., 2002; Ph.D., 2006).

Other details

I was born in High Point, North Carolina and grew up there and nearby. I have been a member of the history faculty at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville since 2010. Before coming to UT-Knoxville, I taught at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina and at the University of Virginia.

New Books in History

I am co-host of a podcast on the New Books Network called New Books in History. If you are a historian and have a book you think I'd like to read and that you'd like to talk about, please do contact me (mblack9[at]utk.edu).